The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks
S I M O N E M. M Ăœ L L E R
INTRODUCTION The Class of 1866
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HE CITY
was in uproar. Bells were rung and guns fired. Candles and fireworks lit up New York City Hall. People swarmed to the streets with boundless enthusiasm and formed a procession along Broadway. At the grand fete at Union Square, people danced to a specially composed “Telegraph Polka” to commemorate the act of putting “a loving girdle round the earth,” in the lyrics of A. Talexy.1 Throughout “the length and breadth of the [entire] country,” every tongue talked of only two things: New York businessman Cyrus W. Field, the “Columbus of America,” and the “eighth wonder of the world,” the Great Atlantic Cable.2 In August 1858, an Anglo-American consortium of engineers, electricians, and entrepreneurs had finally succeeded in laying a telegraphic cable across the Atlantic. Via telegraph, Manchester cotton merchant John Pender, British engineers Charles T. Bright and William Thomson, and American philanthropist Peter Cooper congratulated themselves upon connecting the Old World and the New by electric wire. Meanwhile, newspapers all across the Euro-American hemisphere printed special editions with the “spectacular” story of the wiring of the world. On the streets of New York, blue silk ribbons with the portrait of cable entrepreneur Cyrus W. Field were peddled for women’s jewelry and men’s hatbands. Catering to a public clamoring for souvenirs, jewelers Tiffany and Company sold the remainder of the Atlantic cable in four-inch pieces mounted neatly with brass ferules and a certificate letter signed by Field himself.3 That summer, these emblems of material culture created the mythological narrative of the wiring of the world: the heroic struggle of male protagonists triumphing over the “opposition of nature” through technology.4
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Meanwhile, only some blocks from Broadway, a New York artist, Adam Weingärtner, finished his depiction of a counter-narrative to white masculine technological heroism. Just in time for the September 1 celebration of the laying of the Great Atlantic Cable, he had a lithograph ready for sale. For the artist, this lithograph, “Torchlight Procession Around the World,” summed up the apotheosis of global integration in the nineteenth century. Instead of another likeness of “Cyrus the Great,” “the Ship,” or “the Cable,” Weingärtner had sketched a parade of people from all over the world: Euro-Americans, Asians, Africans, and Native Americans dance around the globe surmounted by a cloud forming the word Liberty. As they hold a telegraph cable girdling the earth, the world’s “civilized” and “heathens” join together in technological “revolution” that seems to hold out the prospect of “global” liberty. In the lower-left and lower-right corners, two cable ships, the American USS Niagara and the British HMS Agamemnon, frame the celebration. Ships and crews are busy laying out the Great Atlantic Cable. Nearby, an irritated Neptune sits with his mermaids in the middle of the Atlantic. The cable laying foreshadows the end of his despotic reign over maritime space. The lithograph, dedicated “To Young America,” is framed by the vignette of four men who had shaped the history of the American Republic through telegraphy: Benjamin Franklin, Captain William L. Hudson, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Cyrus W. Field. After adorning these portraits, the cable follows the arch formed where the hands of two female figures meet in the upper middle part of the lithograph. Dresses and ornaments give them away as Columbia and Britannia. Between the two figures, a member of the U.S. fire brigade straddles an eagle. While he seems to be directing the group’s work, he is also showering the British cable ship HMS Agamemnon with arrows of electrical currents.5 “Torchlight Procession Around the World” is unique among cable memorabilia. The lithograph departs from the iconography of the heroic Atlantic cable entrepreneur established through other portrayals of international telegraphy at the time. In his depiction of the events of the summer of 1858 when telegraphic transmissions joined the Old World and the New for the first time, Weingärtner did not focus solely on singular individuals, but on various groups of international actors. He did not foreground the North Atlantic connection, but the wider world. In the lithograph, the geopolitical ramifications of the 1858 Atlantic connection reach far beyond the telegraph plateau now joining the United
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States and Great Britain as “Anglo-American brethren.” Even the concept of brotherhood appears troubled, given that the American fireman is directing electrical currents toward the British cable ship. Moreover, in Weingärtner’s image, this new “conduit of manifest destinarian energy” was to defibrillate the world and, possibly under the direction of the U.S. fire brigade and not Great Britain’s Union Jack, spread liberty to this multiethnic and multinational procession.6 “Torchlight Procession” in many ways symbolizes the central themes of this study: first, the centrality of international actor networks for understanding the social, cultural, economic, and technological aspects of these “wonders” of “civilization”; second, the multiple, and at times politically and socially highly charged and even contradictory, visions of a “unifying” world through electrical currents; and third, the great importance of infrastructural projects for global integration processes.7 Wiring the World: The Social and Cultural Creation of Global Telegraph Networks focuses on the various protagonists of the submarine telegraph system. It examines the engineers, entrepreneurs, operators, politicians, media reformers, and financiers in the pre-World War I era. It explores how these actors negotiated and battled over the very concepts that helped define an electric world in union. In their function as actors of globalization, these men, and notably also women, linked macrostructural processes of economic imperialism and geopolitics with microstructural interpretations of the means and ends of global communications. They charged economic and political processes with social and cultural meaning.8
ESTABLISHING A GLOBAL TELEGRAPH NETWORK From its very beginning, ocean telegraphy spurred people’s imagination of the scope and content of the world’s future. When the first successful commercial submarine telegraph was laid across the English Channel in 1851, the London Morning Herald published an article celebrating the electric nuptials of England and France and predicting an electric union of the entire planet. In the context of submarine telegraphy, and in contrast to landline connections, entrepreneurs, journalists, politicians, and the public all thought in global dimensions. The importance of submarine telegraphy did not lay in its singularity, but in its multiplicity.
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One cable never functioned in isolation but within a system of cables. Consequently, the “ultimate progress of electro-Telegraphy,” the author of the article wrote, need not be confined solely to the Old World. Since the English Channel had been crossed, Ireland must follow next, “as but a matter of course.” And once Ireland was reached, there lay only “a couple of thousand miles of water or so between the Old World and the New.” Where, after all, lay “the practical difficulty”?9 The story of the Great Atlantic Cable exemplifies that there were still many “practical difficulties” to overcome. The much-celebrated cable of 1858 only functioned for a matter of weeks and transmitted just 271 messages before the connection died.10 The group surrounding Cyrus W. Field, John Pender, and William Thomson only managed to complete a new cable across the Atlantic in 1866. In the meantime, they faced technological capriciousness, financial near-bankruptcy, and the political turmoil of the American Civil War. On top of this, rival actors discussed, scrapped, and planned alternative routes for a telegraphic connection between the Old World and the New. In the end, much cable and money were irretrievably sunk into the ocean before another submarine cable transmitted messages by electrical currents across the Atlantic. Yet, when in 1866 ocean telegraphy finally saw its breakthrough, it initiated the rapid emergence of a system of global communication based on electric speed. After the successful transatlantic connection, contemporaries witnessed the laying of more submarine cables throughout the world. Telegraphs to India (1870), Australia (1872), and Southeast Asia (1870), as well as to the Caribbean (1873/1874), Brazil (1874), and South Africa (1879), swiftly followed. Indeed, by the late 1870s, virtually any place on earth could, at least theoretically, be reached from Europe via submarine cable through a network spanning, at that time, roughly 100,000 miles of ocean cables. In the 1880s and 1890s, popular connections were duplicated and even triplicated, and the ocean network became more densely linked with simultaneously expanding landline connections. In addition, technological developments, such as duplex telegraphy, enabled the passage of two or even four messages from both ends of the wire simultaneously. By 1900, thirteen submarine cables crossed the North Atlantic processing as many as 10,000 messages a day.11 Irrespective of this future success story, contemporaries already perceived the first failed attempts at submarine telegraphy as a caesura separating their age into pretelegraphic and telegraphic eras. In 1858,
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when the first transatlantic cable proved that long-distance communication via ocean telegraphs was feasible, Queen Victoria and the American President James Buchanan anticipated a new era opening up before them.12 To them, the cable was a “triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle.”13 The Great Atlantic Cable stimulated people’s imagination and hopes for a rapidly changing world synchronized to the beat of the electric telegraphs. Journalists, politicians, and merchants expected submarine telegraphy, “one of the grandest and most beneficent enterprises of the age,” to “remove [political] misconceptions” and allow for transactions that would be “worth millions.”14 On top of this, President Buchanan heralded the cable as a “bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world.”15 Indeed, in 1858 and even more so in 1866, the times ahead heralded great changes or “a coherent epoch of world development,” according to historian Charles Maier.16 The following decades saw a nonlinear growth of economic, political, cultural, and social global interdependence as well as the expansion of transboundary networks and spaces of interaction. The emergence of a global communication system based on electrical speed was essential for these processes. With the dematerialization of long-distance communication, message and messenger were decoupled. Through this relative increase of transmission speed compared with material carriers, the telegraph network could be used “to efficiently coordinate, control, and command . . . material movement,”17 or as the historian Jorma Ahvenainen phrased it, only with the ocean telegraphs did world economy and world politics become possible.18 To this day, we continue to assume that communications hold the key to a unified world. In 2009, the scientist Charles Kuen Kao was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. His “groundbreaking achievements” in the transmission of light in fiber-optic cables form a crucial basis of today’s Internet.19 That same year, the laying of 10,000 miles of submarine fiber-optic cable between the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa showed that the wiring of the world was not yet completed. “Closing the Final Link” was the slogan of the pan-African business consortium SEACOM that connected Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Uganda, and South Africa with the world’s communication network. Those formerly
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disconnected were finally tapping into the world communication system. In his opening address, Jakaya Kikwete, then Tanzania’s president, stated that the cable connection represented “the ultimate embodiment of modernity.”20 Despite the rhetorical analogy, history does not repeat itself, nor does the building of SEACOM’s “African Internet” embody a teleology of modernity, in the sense of modernization theorists.21 Nevertheless, these examples demonstrate that questions concerning the logic of a global media and communications system did and still do matter as modern societies depend on communication and the electronic transmission of information on a world scale. Regardless of whether a global communications system is based on ocean telegraphs or fiber-optic cables and satellites, there exist network logics inherent to any communications system that rely on its structure. Previous works have portrayed the processes driving the wiring of the world as an issue of technology, imperialism, or transcontinental business networks. With its focus on the actor networks, this book inserts social and cultural considerations alongside these political and economic issues to understand the wiring of the world and ultimately globalization processes.
ACTOR NETWORKS AND GLOBAL HISTORY In September 1877, Emma Pender, wife of the British cable magnate John Pender, sent a letter to her son-in-law, William des Voeux. William, the husband of her daughter Marion, served as an official of the British Colonial Office. At the time, he was stationed on St. Lucia, a small island in the British Caribbean. In her letter, Emma Pender informed des Voeux about his chances of being transferred back home to London or at least to a place less remote (which in Emma Pender’s imagination meant somewhere within the global telegraph network). The previous day, her husband had consulted about different options with Herbert from the Colonial Office. “Herbert,” a frequently reappearing figure in Emma Pender’s correspondence, signified Sir Robert George Wyndham Herbert, undersecretary of the British Colonial Office and an important government official. Pender and Herbert were well acquainted and met frequently, as “Mr. Pender’s cable business [was] always sufficiently important to take him to the office.”22
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Accounts like these nourish the impression that the cable business and its actors were closely connected to British imperial structures. Indeed, the cable industries’ excellent connections to Herbert and other imperial institutions gave them multiple advantages. It helped them gain access at relatively low cost to resources, such as the insulating material gutta percha, which was primarily found in British colonies, and to ocean sounding data. Additionally, the British government also lent its support during landing right negotiations with other governments. Furthermore, the buildup of the global communications system and its coordination and regulation were deeply entrenched in the logic of imperial power relations as well as Eurocentric notions of civilization. Cable routes primarily followed those of imperial trade and governance, and contemporaries used the technology as a distinctive marker of Euro-America’s superiority over the rest of the world.23 Older scholarship on submarine telegraphy strongly linked cable business and imperial interests. After Harold Innis’s 1950 publication Empire and Communications, the intricate interrelation of communication and the “rise and fall” of empires has predominantly been described under the heading of geopolitics and technology and as a struggle for global control.24 A large majority of the existing literature on global communication and telegraphy accentuates the telegraphs’ importance for imperial control and Euro-American nationalist power politics. Scholars portray telegraphs as “tools of empire” that aided the formation and consolidation of nation-states and empires or helped to generate narratives of national technological progress and development.25 In the end, submarine telegraphy was essential for “Britain’s ascendency as a world power.”26 Consequently, cables, cable manufacturers, and cable contractor companies were attributed a distinct nationality and implicit nationalist agendas. Submarine cables were considered indispensable for the nations’ economic and political benefit and military security.27 This book reconsiders these grand narratives of imperial control and nationalist power politics. Although the actors strongly benefited from imperial and national structures and a global coloniality, i.e., a world shaped through the experience and logic of centuries of colonialism, they did not necessarily embrace imperial interests. Additionally, it is difficult to ascribe a particular nationality to distinct cables or cable companies.28 This methodological nationalism underplays the international financing structure of the cable companies and the transnational working
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agreements between the companies, the nation-states, and international governance.29 Most of all, this book argues, it underplays the actors’ imagined and real spaces of action as well as their conscious instrumentalization of national institutions and their strategic nationalism reflected in their rhetoric.30 The relationship between individual actor networks and imperial and national structures, or the micro and macro levels, was much more complex; the strong entanglements between social and cultural practices and economic and political strategies were much more important for the structure, coordination, and regulation of the global media system than so far explored.31 The approach of global history provides a new avenue to explore telegraphy as a historical force of globalization. Informed by postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, global history challenges Eurocentric narratives of modernization or Westernization alongside the methodological nationalism that has led scholars to assign cable connections a distinct nationality or imperial agenda.32 Global historians of telecommunication, by contrast, use concepts of agency, technology-in-use, and space to approach telegraphy from a perspective that is not bound to the nation-state.33 Following the global history approach, this book emphasizes, through its focus on actors and networks, the importance of other aspects of telegraphy, such as inter- and nongovernmental modes of regulation and coordination, transboundary processes of scientific and business exchanges, and alternative notions of identity formation beyond and outside of the primarily Euro-American nation-state and empire, respectively.34 Finally, the global history approach also reminds us to analyze networks of connections against the backdrop of their disconnections and to see users in relation to nonusers.35 A group of people holding on to the submarine cable are at the center of Weingärtner’s 1858 lithograph, “Torchlight Procession.” Similarly, the individual actors of submarine telegraphy holding on to the structures shaping their world stand at the heart of this study. Yet, while the New York artist depicted a “parade” of people including Euro-Americans, Asians, Africans, and Native Americans, in reality, the actors actually constituting and contesting these cable networks formed a much more limited group. They were mainly white, male, and from the middle class. During previous centuries, the aristocracy had primarily shaped the logic and structures of politics, economy, and culture on a grand scale. Now a new, albeit very diverse, Euro-American middle class constituted the
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prime movers behind the globalization processes so characteristic of the nineteenth century.36 Cyrus W. Field’s portrait on New Yorker’s hatbands epitomized this class. Field, the son of a clergyman from Massachusetts had passed up his chance to go to college for a career in business. At age fifteen, he started out as an errand boy for one of New York’s leading dry goods stores. Quickly, Field was promoted to senior clerk and soon moved on to the paper trade, where he made a fortune within only one decade. Barely thirty, Field was one of New York’s richest men before entering the telegraph business.37 Field’s British business partners, such as John Pender and Richard Glass, were successful merchants emerging from Britain’s industrial middle class before they ventured into the business of submarine telegraphy. Similar to other infrastructural technologies of the time, ocean telegraphy opened up spaces for maneuvering and assigned agency to those middle-class businessmen, such as Cecil Rhodes and Ferdinand de Lesseps, in shaping the course of nineteenthcentury globalization processes. Within a matter of years after 1866, this group of cable entrepreneurs of globalization became an exclusive club. One of the quintessential legacies of the first Atlantic cable is that it not only set in motion the submarine telegraph machinery, but also formed a closed cable community. I call this group of gatekeepers the Class of 1866. They used concepts such as gender, class, and professionalism in addition to cosmopolitanism and Eurocentrism to define eligibility to their group and the world of telegraphy.38 Members of this group of entrepreneurs, electricians and engineers, mariners, journalists, and cable operators dominated the scenes of the global media system until the outbreak of World War I and, in some respects, even beyond. For instance, the cotton merchant turned cable magnate John Pender, the Scottish Lord William Montague-Hay, and James Anderson, the former captain of the (in)famous cable ship, Great Eastern, managed to build up an empire of ocean cables. The global monopoly of their conglomerate, the Eastern and Associated Companies, lasted until 1934 when the submarine cable business gave way to technological and market forces and merged with the wireless business. In their function as the system’s gatekeepers, the Class of 1866 profited immensely from their fame as telegraphic conquerors of the Atlantic—a deliberate manipulation of public memory—as well as the business networks they had built up during the Great Atlantic Cable project. These cable actors defined not only the layout and structure of the
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early global media system but also the purpose and extent of global connectivity. It was their notion of Weltcommunication, to use a contemporary term, most notably expressed in the words of James Anderson as communication between the wealthy few, that determined the scope of global connectivity.39 This does not mean, however, that the Class of 1866 and their understanding of Weltcommunication formed a coherent representation of “Western” modernity. These Euro-American men were not a homogenous group and may not lightly be equated with a universally applicable construction of “the West” as the imperial-capitalist system of the industrial Euro-American states.40 Socially and culturally, New York high society member Field and Scotsman Pender came from very different backgrounds. While Field was deeply religious and believed in the missionary and civilizing qualities of the ocean telegraphs, Pender, as a student of Manchester Liberalism, merely saw them as economic investment, for which, and here he agreed with Field, a concept of “universal peace” was extremely beneficial. Defining the “West” as a coherent political-economic system reduces global entanglements to a unidirectional exploitation of commodities and resources. It disregards not only social and cultural aspects but also the fact that industrial Euro-America equally adapted and responded to its entanglement with “the rest.”41 More than once, the cable entrepreneurs, engineers, and operators had to grapple with non-Western actors, cultures, and geographies surrounding their cable stations. Historians can challenge the structural approach of a one-dimensional and linear process of modernization not just by looking at cases of friction between the West and the rest, of global fragmentation, and in extra-European regions. Rather than relabeling colonial history as global history, a study that primarily deals with the Euro-American world can also rewrite and reclaim a history of modernity in its multiplicity.42 Until the late nineteenth century, and arguably also beyond, there was no homogeneous civilizational community of Euro-America.43 Important cultural differences existed between the American, British, Irish, French, Canadian, Australian, and German actors involved in the wiring of the world. The first news transmissions across the Atlantic, for instance, failed, because there was no common cultural code to enable both ends of the line to understand telegraphic communications. It proved impossible for the British press to understand the significance of a telegraph
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message announcing the death of John Van Buren properly, and they complained bitterly about receiving “such a scrap as this” instead of the price of gold from the North American side of the Atlantic cable. John Van Buren was indicative of Anglo-American misunderstandings via telegraphy: he was son of former U.S. President Martin Van Buren to one side of the Atlantic, but insignificant and wasteful jamming of telegraphic space to the other.44 Approaching the history of the wiring of the world from the perspective of technology-in-use provides another angle on the plurality of visions connected to submarine telegraphy. In particular, the continuous battles between those connected and those unconnected, on the provider and the user sides, reveal vast power disparities. They illustrate the inherent differences within a Euro-American setting and counter the notion of a homogenous form of modernity. From its very beginning, ocean telegraphy served only an exclusive few. Although by the late 1870s virtually any place on earth could be reached from Europe, the network still left many gaps. Depending on the entrepreneurs’ and later also on the governments’ decisions about the cables’ locations and purposes, many places, such as des Voeux’s St. Lucia or rural areas outside of the world’s leading commercial centers, remained unconnected. In addition, ocean telegraphy’s exorbitant tariffs did not enable social or mass communication. In the end, the vast majority of the globe’s population remained unconnected. Submarine telegraphy was by no means a Victorian Internet.45 Henniker Heaton, Australian newspaper publisher, member of the British parliament, and one of this book’s protagonists, fought in vain for a generally affordable, “social” cable press in the pre-World War I period. Labeled by the New York Times as “unofficial postmaster general of the world,” Heaton attempted to secure global communication access “for the millions,” on a crusade quite similar to that of human rights organizations today.46 Finally, the global communication network also supported processes of othering by reconfiguring mental maps of the globe.47 As Eric Hobsbawm points out, although global newsmakers at the time depended on a “shrinkage of the globe” through the instantaneity of news coverage, their reports, such as the “discovery” of David Livingstone, enforced the notion of the “dark continent” or “far-away” places that lay outside of the Euro-American system.48 Disputes on who could use and how to use submarine telegraphy as a global communications system generally ran along the lines of race,
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class, and gender. Yet, throughout the course of the nineteenth century, the protagonists of 1866 also faced challenges from inside their class in their attempt to dominate and regulate the globe as communicational space. Important figures in this struggle are the law reformers David Dudley Field, brother of the cable entrepreneur Cyrus W. Field, and Louis Renault. Both attempted to structure the global media system according to rules and regulations of l’esprit d’internationalité, international law, thereby trying to contribute to the promise of “universal” peace. Other cable entrepreneurs such as the Anglo-German Siemens Brothers, the Americans Jay Gould, John W. Mackay, and James Gordon Bennett, as well as the Australian and Canadian media reformers Henniker Heaton and Sandford Fleming played an important part in the processes of renegotiating global connectivity. Probably the key opponent of John Pender was William Siemens, German émigré, engineer, and head of Siemens Brothers London. Carl Wilhelm Siemens, often known under his Anglicized name (Charles) William, had immigrated to Great Britain in 1844 and first worked as a civil engineer before he embarked on telegraphy. By the late 1850s, he was a recognized authority in the field. In the 1870s, he challenged John Pender’s established Anglo-American Telegraph Company on the North Atlantic connection setting up his own cable company, the Direct United States Cable Company. The Pender-Siemens antagonism that evolved was not merely a business rivalry but entailed a deeper divide over global communication as an economic system and the place of science in it. Read against the story of Britain’s industrial “decline” and the commencement of the American century, it reveals how strongly those global visions also influenced national narratives.49 Finally, incorporating a spatial perspective, this book extrapolates the importance of maritime space as the ground of an alternative modernity that challenged existing notions of nationality and territoriality. These actors’ identity connected far stronger with their profession and its international scientific networks and their working schemes connected with the logic of emerging global capitalism far more than nationalist interpretations of their history have shown. Almost taking on the form of a “maritime empire,” the cable actors’ seascape encompassed all of the world’s oceans and transgressed national boundaries. Along the technical nerves of the globe, almost similar to the Socratic fable of the Greeks as “frogs around a pond,” the telegraph actors constructed a distinct seascape.50 Networks of family dynasties of telegraph operators such as the
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Graves, Mackays, or Perrys ran the various cable stations throughout the world. Moreover, with the expansion of the submarine telegraph network in the nineteenth century, the relatively small group of telegraph engineers, electricians, and operators came to work and travel the world in a way that before was only open to diplomats, military, sailors, or the very rich. Laying or maintaining cables, the engineers and electricians travelled the oceans and used their time during shore leave for sightseeing in Egypt, the Caribbean, or India. Telegraph expert Charles Bright proclaimed that there was “probably no branch of engineering which len[t] itself so readily to a full sight of the world as that of telegraphy.”51 The cable actors not only travelled the world with unprecedented freedom, but also worked indiscriminately for various different governments. This made ocean telegraphy substantially different from landlines. While the landline networks of telegraphy were run, apart from the United States, by governments, submarine telegraphy followed the logic of private enterprise.52 Because governments were reluctant and even opposed to granting landing rights to foreign governments, it fell to the private and “neutral” cable companies to mediate between them. When wiring the Caribbean, for instance, British engineer Charles T. Bright, who had received a knighthood for his contribution to the Great Atlantic Cable, worked simultaneously for the Spanish, Dutch, British, and French. Only by employing Bright and his company as neutral mediators could a functioning ocean cable network be established within a maritime space, such as the Caribbean, where multiple governments were involved. Finally, telegraphic engineering and science were organized transnationally.53 The London-based Society of Telegraph Engineers, for instance, saw itself as a “cosmopolitan institution.” It coordinated, institutionalized, and standardized the exchange and acquisition of knowledge among all telegraph engineers and operators in the world. Engineers and operators carried out their experiments along the ocean cable lines and so within a global maritime laboratory. The cable agents’ transnationalism drew from this transboundary logic of submarine telegraphy. It was based on an ideological system where explanatory models of a universally acclaimed cosmopolitanism as well as a state-centered internationalism, at least initially, played an equal role.54 In fact, the actors’ relationship to imperial and national structures and communities is highly complex. On the one hand, they relied heavily on imperial and national structures, particularly of the British Empire. On the other hand, they primarily identified themselves
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through their profession and followed the necessarily transnational routine of laying and maintaining ocean cables. In the end, they found ways to employ both in the service of their worldwide system in the form of a strategic nationalism. As the example of the American John W. Mackay and his Commercial Cable Company shows, they were “in-betweeners” easily adapting to the varying national contexts they were operating in: American in one situation, and British or German in the next. The Class of 1866, William Siemens and his family, the American media mogul James Gordon Bennett, and his business partner John W. Mackay are some of the more prominent names in this book but not the only ones. As networks only become visible as they emerge from the “inbetween” and the intricate relationship between society and technology solely as “technology-in-use,” this study extends beyond the inventors and cable heroes of the Great Atlantic Cable.55 It also considers the shareholders who financed the system, the journalists who used the system, and the media and law reformers who attempted to shape and reform the system. Furthermore, this study also takes into consideration that direct interaction with the technology was not the only way of experiencing its global outreach. Through news agencies, newspapers, and their distribution of news, globality could be experienced by a large group of people.56 In the end, engineers, entrepreneurs, and telegraph operators as well as media reformers, journalists, and politicians followed their own visions of an electric world in union and attempted to structure its reality accordingly. These diverse visions played themselves out in cable wars, rivalry between science and business, discourses on civilization and universal peace, and almost constant, albeit unsuccessful, challenges to the system’s social scope. In sum, those establishing the structures as well as those rallying against it, users and nonusers alike, determined the history of world-spanning communication in the long nineteenth century.
LAYING OUT THE CABLE STORY Starting with the Great Atlantic Cable enterprise, the book proceeds by topic thematically and relatively chronologically. Each chapter investigates one of the various concepts accredited to submarine telegraphy from the actors’ perspective: world economy, world peace, Weltcommunication and world news, the global organization and codification of
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science, and finally, world politics. At the heart of the analysis, there is the Class of 1866, an Anglo-American group of about forty people, as the dominant mover of the cable business. However, in particular after 1880, a small group of additional actors also moved to the forefront. All in all, it is a network of about 300 known people, not counting the many faceless operators, postal administrators, or employees of cable companies, news agencies, or newspapers of whom the sources reveal only rudimentary traces. To support the flow of reading and facilitate identification, a biographical list of the main protagonists is provided in the appendix. The study ends in 1914. The outbreak of the First World War marked the end of an era in the history of submarine telegraphy and the history of its actors.57 By 1914, most of the key players among the cable protagonists were dead. James Gordon Bennett, newspaper publisher and cable entrepreneur, who died in 1918, was the last of a distinct generation of actors of globalization. In the decade preceding the war, not only the group of cable actors but also the technology itself experienced a distinct shift. From 1902 to 1904, the wiring of the world was ostensibly completed with two cables across the Pacific, which were eventually taken “round about the earth.” Also, in 1901, Guglielmo Marconi successfully transmitted his first wireless transatlantic message. A decade later, wireless had established itself as a serious competitor to the ocean cables for global communication.58 Chapter 1, “Networking the Atlantic,” focuses on the emergence of the Class of 1866 as gatekeepers of the global media system by retelling the story of the Great Atlantic Cable project (1854–1866) from their perspective. It shows how their transatlantic network formed, drawing on preexisting local structures, such as the cable entrepreneurs of the British national telegraph system, the group of American expatriates in London, and the elite circle of New Yorkers residing at Gramercy Park. In fact, these preexisting social networks were vital for the success of transnational infrastructure projects as neither the lone entrepreneur, like Cyrus W. Field, nor ingenious inventors and engineers, like Samuel F. B. Morse or Charles T. Bright, can be solely credited for directing globalization processes. Finally, by forging a clever and not always accurate cable memory culture, the Class of 1866 not only managed to remain the dominant force in the field of global telegraphy and dictate the contemporary cable discourse, but also, in many respects, have continued to do so until the present day.
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Chapter 2, “The Battle for Cable Supremacy,” examines the economic aspects of the business of submarine telegraphy with a strong focus on the 1870s when crucial structures and trends emerged. Key actors in this chapter are John Pender, James Anderson, and their Eastern and Associated Cable Companies, as well as the Siemens clan and their two cable manufacturing and operating companies, Siemens Brothers and the Direct United States Cable Company. When, in the 1870s, both entered into a fierce “cable war” over the monopoly on the Atlantic cable market, their conflict expanded beyond business rivalry into a controversy concerning the very structure of their business system. While Pender argued for a system of monopoly aiming at capital accumulation, Siemens stood for a system of competition allowing for technological progress. The nucleus of their argument has been reproduced in a larger picture with the decade-long debate among historians on the British industrial “decline” and the emergence of a multicentered economic world in the late nineteenth century. It further touches on the divisions between science and technology and a dispute on the place of the engineer in cable business. In its last part, the chapter offers an analysis of shareholder lists and gives detailed insights into the financial network structure of ocean telegraphy. From the 1870s on, the increasing popularization, affordability, and nationalization of ocean cable stock accompanied the shift from big business to small investors. Finally, the analysis sheds fresh light on the New Woman of the late nineteenth century as well as women as actors within ocean telegraphy.59 Chapter 3, “The Imagined Globe,” explores the power relations entailed in technological progress as expressed in notions of an electric union, universal peace, and Euro-America’s civilizing mission. Initially, different national and local contexts, such as the influence of Manchester Liberalism on the British actors as well as the notion of a Societas Christiana for the American actors, played an equally important role in the construction of concepts of an “electric union” and an imagined globe. The appearance of David Dudley Field and Louis Renault, French jurist and Nobel Peace Prize winner of 1907, as key codifiers of international law in the 1870s, however, marks the transition to the institutionalization of a third explanatory model for “universal peace,” l’esprit d’internationalité. Finally, the chapter suggests that the idea of a unified market of morality via means of global communication encompassed not only the notion of universal peace but also the concept of “civilization.” The demarcation
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line between the two ran not only between the “West” and the “rest” but sometimes also right through it. Chapter 4, “Weltcommunication,” deconstructs the notion of the telegraph as a medium of mass communication. The ocean telegraphs nourished not only a “time-space compression,” but also a division of communicational space between those who could pay and those who could not.60 Exploring the cable agents’ theory of communication, the chapter shows that due to the actors’ strong emphasis on revenues, the new Weltcommunication was from its beginning based on geopolitical structures of economic and political interests. Nevertheless, throughout the long nineteenth century, we also find repeated attempts to challenge such a materiality of global communication, first in the form of news agents in the 1880s and, later on, in Henniker Heaton’s campaign for a social tariff. Finally, drawing attention to James Gordon Bennett, owner of the New York Herald and the Commercial Cable Company, the chapter explores yet another systemic shift in the organization of the global communication system: a market advantage was no longer obtained via control over vertical business networks concerning the manufacture, laying, and operating of cables, but via the concerted organization of the cables and their content. Bennett’s fight against Jay Gould and Western Union for the independence of the Associated Press further illustrates the influence of local systems and forces on global systems. What has so far been overlooked in the literature dealing with the Commercial Cable Company and the Atlantic pool is that their conflict was as much a cable war as it was a news war. Chapter 5, “The Professionalization of the Telegraph Engineer,” focuses on the engineers, electricians, and operators and the Society of Telegraph Engineers, of which many of the Class of 1866 were members. Relating the history of the society as a cosmopolitan institution and its slow demise as a global authority, the chapter accounts for the interplay of globalization and nationalization processes. The example of the society illustrates not only a transition from transboundary cosmopolitanism to internationalism, but also the diversification of science from a Londoncentrism to a multicentered scientific globe. The analysis further points to the importance of the global dimension for telegraphic science and research. The society’s history in its relation to the cable stations represents the interplay of local and global forces, or rather of central versus local control. In this dispute, the underlying distinction between scientific philosophy (the society) and experientia docet (the cable stations) related
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to questions of authority and discursive hegemony. This eventually furthered the notion of ocean telegraphy as a technology in stagnation. Chapter 6, “Cable Diplomacy and Imperial Control,” analyzes the interplay of globalization and nationalization processes and explores the highly complex and continuously evolving relationship between governmental representations and cable agents. As part of their job and as a side effect of landing-right regulations, the cable agents took on the role as “neutral” elements between the nations at the respective cable end. They were cable diplomats, translating and mediating between various national agendas. Events of 1898, however, with the Spanish-American War and the Fashoda Crisis, exposed as a delusion the cable agents’ belief in cables solely as a means of commerce and sounded the death knell for cable neutrality. The growing world economy and the development of competing industrial powers besides Great Britain, a growing pluralism in the ocean cable system, and the period of new imperialism additionally complicated the new situation for the cable agents in the period prior to World War I. The cable actors’ response to this paradigmatic shift was the employment of nationalism as a strategy: officially they tied themselves ever closer to one particular national discourse, thereby disguising and thus protecting the international financial and working setup of their company. There is probably no image more fitting than Weingärtner’s lithograph “Torchlight Procession” to capture the hopes and excitement created by the idea of global communication by means of submarine telegraphs. The painter vividly expressed one of the many visions contemporaries harbored of a rapidly changing world, girdled by a net of wires and synchronized to the beats of dots and dashes: “universal” peace, world trade, global politics, and Weltcommunication. Form and content of these concepts, however, varied widely, and the actors involved in the wiring of the world disputed them continuously over the course of the nineteenth century. Engineers, entrepreneurs, journalists, media reformers, politicians, and financiers harbored very distinct visions of a world in electric union as they were influenced by their respective individual, regional, national, or international structures. In the end, cultural, socioeconomic, political, and technological structures played important roles in the establishment, coordination, and regulation of the global communications system based on submarine telegraphs. Looking at the wiring of the world from the actor networks’ perspective extrapolates the myriad of meanings globalization processes could take on.